by Louisa Hall
“That’s fine, Jack,” William said, although it certainly was not fine. He refused to look at Weld. He wanted to be alone with Adelia. There was a clarity to her presence that he needed. She was so intently focused on the match that her nails had dug eight red crescents into her palms.
“Look, William,” Weld continued. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m with you. I understand the value of history on Little Lane. We have a past, and it wouldn’t be right to let it go like that, with the snap of a finger. It will break my heart to see that carriage house torn down. But we have systems in place. Rules for governance. We can’t just ignore the vote of everyone else on the street.”
Adelia put one hand on William’s thigh. “What a point!” she said. “Focus, William, she’s playing, you’ve got to watch this.”
But William couldn’t focus. His eyes were losing their grip on the match. An image of his carriage house, decaying in Anita Schmidt’s backyard, rose in his mind. It was a beautiful building once. Designed by his own grandfather, described in the papers as one of the foremost examples of shingle architecture in the United States. While other men of his generation dreamed of making their fortunes in industry, William’s grandfather dreamed of perfect spaces, of rooms designed so that within their walls you became a better version of yourself, more capable and brave. That was the kind of blood that ran in William’s veins. Inside the carriage house, there was one cavernous room and a loft under thick cedar beams. Encompassed by slabs of hewn wood, the air was hushed. It held promise. One corner was rounded into a turret shape; the roof was a series of intersecting gambrels, one for the turret, one for the carriage room, one for the owl’s nest that peeked up over the loft. Outside, the shingles were white on the siding, dove gray on the roof, weathered by decades of wind. It was the kind of house that belonged on a windswept beach, confronting the tumult. When William was a boy, there was a telescope in the owl’s nest, pointed out over the downhill slope of Little Lane. As children, he and Adelia, best friends by proximity, played pirates in the loft, surveying the houses beneath them and crying out their barbaric yawps. What she lacked in gender and years, Adelia made up for with ferocity. One evening she very nearly cut off her finger for the sake of a complicated escape; William had to hold her hand above her head, in the cathedral light that filtered through the owl’s nest, in order to prevent catastrophe. That carriage house, as it was maintained in those days, inspired William to go to architecture school. It was all that remained on Little Lane of his grandfather’s craft. The main house was rebuilt after a lightning fire, and since the subdivision, neighborhood covenants had all but required the construction of stucco faux-colonials. The subdivision, sloppily executed by William’s father, so that the carriage house fell on Anita Schmidt’s plot of land. And now the carriage house, too, had been sacrificed by the neighborhood association in their crusade for democratic mediocrity. How far it had fallen from its original form! His children had never known it as it once was. For them, it was a collapsing relic, rodent-infested, the window in the owl’s nest shattered and never replaced.
William closed his eyes. He felt the crisp lines of his structure dissolving. “Weld,” he said, summoning his reserves, “I will say this once, and then I will watch my daughter play. My grandfather built that carriage house. If Anita Schmidt would let me on her property, I’d take care of the rodent problem. It’s a goddamn shame. That carriage house is my family. It’s history.”
“Of course it’s history,” Weld said. “But it’s not actually historical, according to the county historical society.” He lifted his palms, innocent as a murderous boy. “I’m with you, but as president of the neighborhood association, I can’t just ignore the petition.”
William’s headache had escalated. It struck him that what Weld was doing amounted to aggravated assault. There were arrows of pain lancing the base of his skull, spots in the field of his vision. He pressed his temples between his thumb and middle finger, then tried focusing on Weld for one final word.
“I won’t talk about the goddamn carriage house,” he said. “My daughter is playing tennis. If you will, I’m going to focus on that.”
Upon uttering this, he turned back to watch Diana, and his face went entirely numb.
Chapter 2
Before the doctor ushered the girls into William’s room, he held a brief consultation in the waiting room. “Your father’s condition is stable,” he reported, holding his face mask politely folded in one hand. “Fortunately, the stroke was a minor one. It was lucky that Dr. Weld recognized its symptoms early.” He oriented his body toward the girls. Off to the side, excluded by their closeness, Adelia stood by herself. A woman not his wife, dressed foolishly in a pink cardigan with pearl buttons. But none of them had even been born when she and William stood poised on the brink of their lives, next-door neighbors on a crucially important street, their bodies thrumming with the voltage of all their potential. None of them knew. To them she was only a faded woman, dressed in a cardigan she’d chosen because it seemed cheerful, but in which now she felt childish and absurd, standing on her corner of hospital linoleum, watching William’s daughters experience a grief that rightfully belonged to them.
The doctor consulted his clipboard. He puzzled for a moment, as if considering an allergy. “Adelia?” he finally asked, looking up from his notes.
The girls turned toward her, and Adelia stood straighter to withstand their collective scrutiny. Diana was still dressed in her tennis clothes. Come stand with me, Adelia wanted to beg her. It would have helped her hold up to Isabelle, tall and polished, her face framed by long hair. To the scrutiny of a teenage girl, that particularly terrifying kind. But Diana only looked away, and even Elizabeth withheld herself, despite the bond Adelia dared to imagine they’d built this year. Elizabeth held her daughters by their shoulders, radiating such motherly authority that her sisters could scarcely help but be drawn to her side. Adelia had rarely seen them standing so close. In the moment of William’s weakness, a new intimacy emerged. Normally, they orbited around their father like planets in separate spheres; now Elizabeth filled the role of matriarch. All year she had floundered, lacking a role. Here, of all places, she’d hit a certain stride. Her gestures had taken on new breadth. She offered her sisters long embraces. A head or two beneath the level of their elders, Lucy and Caroline stood as guarantee of their mother’s maternal substance, clinging to her closely, moving with her as she surged into position at the family’s helm.
And off to the side, shriveled Adelia, childless. The doctor had summoned her into sight, and the girls remembered this woman who had entered their lives ten years ago and persisted in clinging to them, an enormous burr. If they only knew that she, too, was once a girl their age. But how could they know? They took the luxury of staying young, these children of William’s. When Adelia was a girl, you couldn’t linger in your endless childhood. William asked her to marry him after his first year of college, and that was reasonable at the time. She was seventeen. Her family was moving to a suburb in Connecticut. When she told him on their way to the club, he shrugged: Then let’s get married now. She was younger than Isabelle, with no idea what it meant to be married. We’ll wait until after college, he said when he saw the terror on her face. Not terror at the idea of spending her life with him, just terror that they couldn’t be children forever. Even now the word “woman” made Adelia cringe. But then! At seventeen years old! When he asked her, she challenged him to a game of left-handed tennis: If you beat me, I’ll marry you. And then she creamed him, because she hoped they could stay as they were forever, through to the end of time. But he went back to college angry, and she moved to Connecticut. She wrote him letters, but his replies were curt: to one he answered, “These are things you’ll understand when you’re not a little girl.” It hurt her feelings. “I’m dating a senior,” she lied the next time she wrote. She hoped that would slow things down. Or else she was proving herself, a crafty competitive child
. He never wrote back. After his senior year, he married Margaux and left late-blooming Adelia behind.
Adelia averted her eyes from Elizabeth to focus on the grandkids: Caroline with her pink plastic glasses, squinting upward as if they hadn’t gotten the prescription right; Lucy glaring sideways at her older sister with that feasting expression that sometimes took hold of her face. Adelia wanted to go kneel beside them, to escape to their height. Normally, she felt antagonized by children, but these girls were different, these children of William’s blood. Adelia slipped into their company easily. If she could go to them now, the three of them could speak a language of their own, like dolphins or whales, beyond the radar of their sharp-eared mother or their complicated aunts.
Lucy and Caroline, like her, were children of Little Lane. They came to be taken care of on weekends when Elizabeth had to work at the studio. When they did, Adelia walked over from her house on Mather Street and imagined that they were her own. Sometimes, in William’s kitchen, she tried to bake them cakes. She’d never had an instinct for baking, and the cakes were always flattened on one or all sides, but even so, the girls could be counted on to eat, and if Lucy wasn’t pouting, she’d ask Adelia to tell them about William when he was a little boy. Then Adelia would close her eyes and remember the sheen of his fair hair under the sun, the way he moved on court, the expression on his face as if he were just about to laugh, even when he was sprawling out for a drop shot. She’d point out the house where she lived as a little girl, across the street, with the long screened-in porch where she used to sit and wait for William to appear. She’d tell them stories about the carriage house, where she and William played games of pirate in the loft beneath its rafters. How their friendship ceased when he was eleven and she was eight—when those ages seemed too distant to cross—and resumed again in high school when he saw her playing tennis at the club. He leaned on the net post, watching her. You’ve gotten pretty good! he said, and she blushed so deeply that she felt it in the webs of her fingers. She’d tell them about the way she could beat him if they played left-handed, about the way he changed an empty house when he walked through the door and called her name up the stairs. About sitting in the carriage house and planning their lives, their legs swinging off the side of the loft. How, with him, oddly, she could feel new parts of herself: her kneecaps, the arches of her feet, the edges of her shoulder blades when they pressed against the cedar planks of the loft.
These things she told the grandkids, closing her eyes to remember them better, and if she opened her eyes, there was William himself, sitting at the kitchen table or in his reclining chair, watching her above the horizon of his newspaper. He watched, and sometimes he entered the plane of their pretending so that for the length of an entire Saturday, forgetting that Margaux was only upstairs, they played the parts of the family Adelia imagined she might have had if she’d grown up as women are meant to grow.
“Adelia?” the doctor asked again.
“I am Adelia,” she heard herself reply, in a language that didn’t belong to dolphins or whales but sounded instead like cold fingers tapping against a windowpane.
“Mr. Adair asked to see you along with his children,” the doctor said.
They looked at her. Adelia had the strange idea that they might stand there eternally, blocking her way to his room, but already they were moving forward. Of course they wouldn’t block her. Not even Izzy would be so cruel. Elizabeth instructed her daughters to wait; they slumped in their shiny plastic seats as the elders filed in. Only Adelia, last in line, gave them a final look before the curtain that smelled of antiseptic parted before her and William appeared.
His lips were dry. His shoulders were bare down to the blue sheet that had been pulled up over his chest. In the hospital’s fluorescent light, Adelia could see sad contours in his shoulders that she hadn’t noticed before. There were a few white hairs on his sternum, usually hidden by the collars of his polo shirts. His aging skin, his hair. She had somehow never imagined these components of William: he was William, entire, not composed of physical parts. Adelia could feel herself blinking rapidly to tamp down the emotion that was rising in her.
In front of her, the girls each went to him.
“Dad,” Diana whispered, leaning over him. She kissed him and he turned away. “Oh, thank God,” Elizabeth said, taking her father’s hand, shouldering her way to his side. “Thank God you’re okay.” William received her attentions; he seemed to be exercising fortitude. Isabelle’s kiss was briefer. She swept in and withdrew, sparing in her effusions. And then the three of them stood by his side.
It would have been unimaginable, ten years ago, to see them in this state. When Adelia came back to Breacon after the second divorce, she saw them first at the country club Easter brunch. She knew she’d see them eventually; she’d come back for them, after all. For years she watched them growing up in Christmas cards; twenty-three cards were pinned with magnets to the refrigerator in her Brooklyn Heights apartment. The first one arrived just after her first divorce. She was living alone, twenty-six years old, starting her first year of law school. She’d dropped out of college and quit the tennis team to marry Ed in the middle of her senior year. She told herself she was staying on schedule and managed to feel proud. Two years later, she found herself crying over a fallen spinach soufflé: “I wanted more for myself,” she told him. He had only just gotten home from the office; he was wearing his suit, and in one hand he held a fresh glass of Scotch. “Then we’ll have children,” he told her, attempting to touch her with his empty hand. Her laugh sounded like a dropped glass breaking. And so she divorced him, Adelia the Brave. She found the Brooklyn apartment. From her window she could see barges passing slowly under the bridge. She finished her college credits and applied for law school. She wore knee-high rubber boots when she trudged through the snow to her classes; her hood had a fur lining.
In December, she opened a Christmas card to find a photo of William with his wife and their baby, Elizabeth. She kept it on the refrigerator all that year out of loyalty, though catching a glimpse of it felt like swallowing a rock. Every night when she got home from studying in the library, she took her cottage cheese and olives out of the refrigerator and considered the surprised smile on Margaux’s face, the baby’s pale hair. She saw them once a year, so they changed dramatically each time. As she watched, Adelia’s jealousy shifted, and she became attached to them in her way. Five years after Elizabeth, Diana appeared, squinting and bald. Later there was one of Diana and Elizabeth dressed as crabs, crouched on the beach. Adelia could see William’s shadow on the sand beside them, cast from where he stood behind the camera. In an abstract sense, she started to imagine that she was their banished mother. It was easier with Diana, who had none of Margaux’s looks. She was fair, like William, broad-shouldered and strong. For a long time she had a page-boy haircut and the straight lines of a tomboy. She was the kind of girl Adelia imagined she could raise.
In the same Brooklyn Heights apartment, with the Adairs pinned to her refrigerator, Adelia graduated law school and went to work at a firm. Her hours got longer. She had no family of her own and didn’t necessarily regret this until, at the age of thirty-six, she received the card with baby Isabelle. When she pinned that card up, Adelia understood that she was ready to have a child. She was ready to hold that baby in her arms. She felt it with a ferocity that nearly knocked her over. She had to kneel down on the kitchen floor and place her forehead on the vinyl tiles to steady herself, drawing deep breaths into the great empty pit of her stomach.
The next morning she set about the task of finding a husband. What she ended up finding was Peter Magnusson, a lawyer three years her junior whom she met at a conference on tax reform. During their initial outings, he seemed sensitive and tidy enough to fit into her life without excessive disruption; it was possible, however, that her judgment was not performing at peak capacity. She was so blinded by her desire to have a child like Isabelle that home
less men started to look like they were a single shower away from paternal possibility. That spring she asked Peter Magnusson to marry her, and two weeks later they arrived at the courthouse to undergo a civil ceremony with a judge whose uncompromising stance on tax fraud Adelia particularly admired. That night she and Peter crossed the threshold of her apartment and she dreamed vivid dreams of immediate conception.
Peter, as it turned out, was shy about anything that occurred in the bedroom and avoided it assiduously. In every other regard, he was careful of her feelings. He cooked her elaborate dinners, and she grew to love the sandalwood smell of the pomade he combed into his hair in the morning. But his excuses for sexual avoidance were manifold and increasingly embarrassing. For three years Adelia crafted various strategies for entrapment. Still, they never conceived. Dreams of immediate conception became dreams of immaculate conception. Peter’s presence was a constant apologetic hovering. They attempted in vitro fertilization. Despite the insane expense of the procedure, it failed to produce a blastocyst for Adelia to nurture. The doctor informed her that it was possible she had a “hostile womb.” That was something Adelia had suspected of herself for some time, but to hear a professional tell her as much made her cry in his office as if he’d told her that all the world’s children would die. By her side, Peter patted her hostile hand.
After drying her tears, Adelia fired the doctor. The next ob-gyn was a fresh-faced woman in her prime childbearing years. She assured Adelia that there was no such thing as a hostile womb and proposed a second go at IVF. Peter seemed crestfallen at the news, yet determined Adelia forged ahead with her plans. On the day of the appointment, Peter accompanied her as far as the doctor’s waiting room and then stood and left the building. Two days later he reappeared in their apartment and told her he wasn’t sure he wanted a baby. A wave of exhaustion hit her and she slept for two days, which accounted for the only two sick days she’d ever had an occasion to take. After she finally got up, she walked over to the refrigerator, looked at William’s family, and started to cry. She was forty years old. In her first marriage, she missed the chance to play tennis as she might have played. In her second marriage, she missed the chance to have a family. And years ago, in ancient history, before she even understood that chances could be lost, she missed the chance to live with William and be his wife.
